Re: [XBoard-devel] some configure.ac questions/ possible gettext solution

[h . g . muller]

Op Do, 18 september, 2014 7:43 am schreef Arun Persaud:
>
> I also played with the gettext problem a bit and it seems that removing
> the line AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.17) from configure.ac and adding all
> files to git that are created by a gettextize -f would fix our problem. I
> would run the gettextize everytime before we do a release and then update
> the files in git. This seems to be case 2 on [1] and the drawback listed
> as 2a doesn't seem to be valid, since people need that anyway to build
> from git and 2b is not really an issue when using git, since rebasing and
> merging is easy.
>
> What do you all think?
>

It seems to me we are already doing (2), by having a directory m4 with
standard macros in git. And that this is contributing to the problem. The
files added to git when you had gettextized it were not working on my
system, and to build at all I had to regettextize it first. So it seems
that (2) in fact reaches exactly the opposite goal of what they state
here: rather than distributing the files causing it to work automatically
for everyone, it would in fact wreck it every time you checked out a
version last built by someone else.

The link you gave is very illuminating, especially the final paragraph:

"The version number used as argument to AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION is the
version of the gettext infrastructure that the package wants to use. It is
also the minimum version number of the ‘autopoint’ program. So, if you
write AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.11.5) then the developers can have any
version >= 0.11.5 installed; the package will work with the 0.11.5
infrastructure in all developers’ builds. When the maintainer then runs
gettextize from, say, version 0.12.1 on the package, the occurrence of
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.11.5) will be changed into
AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION(0.12.1), and all other developers that use the CVS
will henceforth need to have GNU gettext 0.12.1 or newer installed."

This clearly states that there should be no problem at all to specify
version 0.17 or earlier in the configure.ac. Like with any configuring, it
is supposed to represent the minimum requirement, and it should be set to
as low a version as is capable to support what our C source needs, so that
as many people as possible can build. As there seem to be no people around
that still uses gettext 0.16, though, requiring 0.17 seems acceptable.

The problem seems to be that we then subvert this strategy by putting
files in git that are gettext-version dependent, and in this case belong
to a higher version. Rather than relying on autopint to create the files
based on the version spec.

H.G.